Tedde van Gelderen

President

Tedde infuses Akendi, its services and methodology with his strong belief that customer and user experience design must go beyond a singular product interface, service or content. It should become deeply rooted in an organization’s research and design processes, culture,and ultimately be reflected in their products and services.

A graduate of Radboud University, the Netherlands in Cognitive Ergonomics, Tedde has more than two decades of experience in experience research, usability testing and experience design in both public and private sectors.

Prior to founding Akendi, Tedde was a founding partner of Maskery & Associates. He has worked for companies including Nortel Networks, KPMG Management Consulting and Philips Design.

Author Archives: Tedde van Gelderen

Just this morning I was reminded of something I’d used in past talks and I wanted to revisit the concept. The conversation I had was around our Experience Thinking process that we apply at Akendi. We talked about things like why you do certain phases like Strategy and Innovation and when. We then turned to… Read more

Ok, we’re all humans. It is a label that encompasses us all. But in experience research and design we rarely, if ever, create for or try to understand the human. It’s usually the different types of humans we’re interested in. Because once we understand who they are, we can list and prioritise these groups of… Read more

Empathy is a popular term in user experience design nowadays. Many recommend that designers need to empathise to create better experiences. And I’d wholeheartedly agree with that. But what I read in these conference talks, blog posts and other publishing places differs greatly from what I hear when designers talk to each other. The difference… Read more

That’s the amount of time I had for writing this blog post. It meant I had to be creative, focused and not be distracted for this period if I had any hope of finishing the post. As for me (and I assume others) the writing of these things are done in several takes, I write… Read more

Today I came back from a lunch where I talked with a potential client about their product. This was a first conversation so most of the time was spent discussing what their software and business was and what I could do to help improve the user experience. I enjoy these conversations as we’re not getting… Read more

I’m going to talk about our clients; the clients who pay for our work, for whom we love to go out of our way to make happy. I’d like to talk about how these clients behave towards us before, during and after our work is complete and how their behaviour can greatly enhance, or just as… Read more

Last week at the dinner table I had a conversation that pushed my thinking. My oldest child is going to university and her friend is in her first year. Her friend talked about what topic she studied and how interesting it was. At that point I jumped in and shared my passion for UX; the field,… Read more

Working in UX has taught me one thing: Never underestimate a user’s will to take shortcuts then question why something doesn’t work. So, what makes sense and how can we avoid this? It makes sense to talk to and, most importantly, listen to a user to find out their needs (and wants, wishes and desires.) It… Read more

Predicting how many teams figure out their product requirements has been following a distinct pattern over the years for me. Many times when I find myself in a sales situation, the conversation arrives at how the organization’s team has designed and, prior to that, figured out, what the product should be or do. In short,… Read more

In my UX consulting life I go through many, sometimes brief, cycles of meeting a potential new client, talk about what their pain points are, what we offer and how we can help address their pain points. In the course of these sales journeys I see some conversations come up more than others. The pain… Read more

At some point, in your early career as a UX designer, it happens: you are working on a project with multiple, even many stakeholders that each put in their “2 cents”, their point of view on button labels, screen flows, screen element placement and color choices. Their seemingly ‘small’ suggestions turn out to be much… Read more

I’m sure we have all encountered new types of interactions in public and office spaces that made us react with a ‘that is odd’, ‘I don’t know what to do’, ‘this makes me feel uncomfortable’. This next one, the ‘smart elevator’, resulted in one of those reactions. For me, this was the second time… Read more

There is a growing sentiment that Storytelling is a thing in User Experience land, and that it’s something we need to take notice of and somehow integrate into the work we do in projects. To dig a little deeper into UX Storytelling, I did a little informal research of my own and found that about… Read more

As an advocate of Experience Thinking™, a process that introduces the user as a stakeholder throughout the development of a product or service, I am often engaged in conversation around what exactly Experience Thinking™ is and why it is important that companies adopt an experience-centric approach. As this is a conversation I’ve had several times,… Read more

When I see some association websites it strikes me that they have a hard time serving the right content to their diverse audience: a balance of posting useful information, advocating for their cause, promoting membership and sharing event details. It seems that the conversation at the design table revolves around making as many people happy… Read more

What is the best approach for usability testing? At the moment, there are three main options for conducting usability test research studies: lab based, moderated remote sessions and unmoderated remote sessions. Lab based Usability Testing Lab testing: this is the oldest and still most common way to conduct a usability test. The participant and facilitator… Read more

We at Akendi are increasingly asked to conduct usability tests with digital products in the later stages of product development. This means we come in to test at the stage where the wireframes are already worked out and the client is working on the coding and visual / brand design of the digital product. So,… Read more

We recently completed an experience mapping exercise as part of a recent project. It was done to help capture the company’s internal knowledge of each product lifecycle stage, understand what the users’ goals were, their activities in each phase as well as aspects like emotion, product value, business opportunity, and others. We used the experience… Read more

In today’s world of ever-changing technology where the “latest and greatest” is constantly being advertised as being the next best thing, why is it that the personal touch is often what makes us remember a brand? On a recent business trip I found myself in a situation where I had to book a last minute… Read more

What is the best time to do usability testing when I’m developing a new product or service? When you consider the place of usability testing in the overall product development process, then there are two main types of usability test: formative testing and summative testing. (sometimes usability testing is referred to as user experience testing)… Read more

Akendi is a product strategy, user experience design and usability research firm. We are passionate about the creation of intentional experiences – whether those involve digital products, physical products, mobile, service or bricks-and-mortar interactions. We work shoulder-to-shoulder to optimize the experiences you deliver. Akendi Corporate Overview (PDF).